[Correspondence] Lessons from the INTERVAL study

July 7, 2018

The Lancet 391, 10140 (2018)

Author: Katja van den Hurk, Marian G J van Kraaij, Saurabh Zalpuri

Research on blood donor health is an expanding field, but it faces specific challenges when identifying the health consequences of blood donations. For instance, the healthy donor effect is a type of selection bias inferring that donors are a healthier subset of the general population because of donor selection procedures and self-selection by donors.1 This selection bias might lead to an underestimation of potential harms caused by blood donation, and an overestimation of its health benefits in observational studies or even within a donor population.